Charuta Fadnis, senior vice president, research & product strategy at Phocuswright hosted ‘The Breakfast Show In North America’ at WiT Virtual Summit on 24 June when she interviewed Melissa Maher, chief inclusion officer & senior vice president, Expedia Group, on issues from the company’s recovery programme to its diversity and inclusion initiatives.
Here are the key takeaways:
Helping hotel and hospitality partners recover
Expedia has a large recovery plan in place after carrying out research with 10,000 hotel partners, asking them what they want to see from a recovery standpoint, and built a whole programme around that, reveals Melissa Maher.
“The other thing that’s very important for us is focusing on destinations. We set aside US$25 million in advertising and marketing for destinations at large, so making sure that as destinations start to open, we’re supporting them at the destination level.
“Another thing that we’ve done, which is kind of interesting for the hotel and hospitality industry is we just launched Expedia Group Academy. … We got a lot of feedback that we could take the learning material that we have and open up it more broadly to the hospitality industry, particularly the industry team members who have been furloughed, using our training materials to give them an opportunity to upskill themselves. We have Expedia Group leaders who are leading some sessions, as well as other industry experts. We’re very excited about this as it is something new and unique to really help our hospitality partners around the world from hospitality.
Is Expedia’s US$275 million recovery fund to shore up the group’s competitive position and have hoteliers get more dependent on the company?
“Good question. As I said, we went to our partners and asked them our partners what they wanted from us and built the programme around that. We talked to over 10,000 hotel partners, did 125 webinars just to get a feel for what partners wanted. And that’s why we built the programme, we really want to be at the centre of helping travel rebound.
“And as I mentioned, hoteliers want visibility in our store, for when travel rebounds they want to be front and centre. They want data. So we’re giving an enhanced data that that goes beyond what we were giving before and driving demand into their particular hotels. It’s completely optional, hotels can opt in or opt out if they want to.
“It’s still fairly early but we’ve seen good results so far, and the partners and owners that we’ve talked to have been happy with us taking this initiative. We’ll phase roll this out when markets pick up.
Impact of Covid on Expedia’s partnership with Marriott
“It (partnership) is still on track. Covid obviously has slowed things down, but we’ve been pleased with the results and with the operational side of it. It’s also been a great opportunity for us to have increased conversation with our partners, about ways that we can collaborate now to drive more business.
“Also as part of what we did with Marriott we’ve also offered another version to support independent hotels, small chains and owners by releasing a streamlined version of what we did with Marriott. We’ve been working on that for the last few months.”
Will short term alternative accommodation rentals have an advantage over traditional hotels?
“Our data is telling us that travellers are gravitating towards vacation rentals for the reasons of more space and that they can feel more comfortable as it relates to social distancing. We’re also seeing people just want to get away for long weekends and to short haul destination. We’re definitely seeing an uptick in vacation rentals.
“The other thing our data is telling us is we’re seeing very unique booking windows. We’re seeing booking windows that are very short term for today or tomorrow, or very long term for six months out. These are the kind of the extremes that we’re seeing on booking.”
On equity, issues about systemic bias, institutional racism and Expedia’s role in tackling them.
“We’ve had inclusion and diversity at Expedia in the lodging business and Expedia Group for a couple of years. We actually call it inclusion and diversity, because we wanted to make sure that inclusion was really focused on because inclusion is about welcoming all types of identities and having a safe and welcoming environment where people feel comfortable to do their best work.
“One of the things that we did is we shared data broadly with our entire company … We’ve said to our 25,000 employees that we will start sharing this on a regular basis. Sharing the data also allows us to track. We’re also doing a self ID campaign that will allow us to get better data so that we can measure. We’ve also put in place dashboards for all of our leaders so that they can track each representative group by promotion, retention, hiring such as better visibility in the numbers.
“Our CEO has been very actively involved in helping lead this discussion, which has been great. And one of the really exciting things that he said to all of Expedia Group members last week is we’re in the process of goal setting. He said that he wants every single employee to have at least one inclusion goal.
“And the other thing we’ve been doing a couple of months ago, but has since accelerated, is looking at the entire employee lifecycle. From when someone is looking to apply for a role at Expedia, looking that inclusion and diversity is woven into that process, making sure that when people are interviewing that they’re thinking about inclusion and diversity – all the way through the lifecycle to exit interviews and why our people are exiting Expedia.”
Have a watch of the full conversation in video below.
